PIA08393: Rainbow on the Rings

The opposition effect, a brightness surge that is visible on Saturn’s
rings when the sun is directly behind the spacecraft, is captured here as
a colorful halo of light moving across Saturn’s sunlit rings.

The rainbow of color seen here is actually an artifact and a by-product of
the spot’s movement and the way the color image was produced. Cassini
acquires color images by taking sequential exposures using red, green and
blue spectral filters, which are then composited together to form a color
view. The bright patch traveled across the rings between exposures taken
for this view, creating a series of three colorful spots showing its
position at three separate moments.

See PIA08247 for more information about the opposition effect. PIA08267
shows a movie sequence of the bright spot traveling across the rings.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 9 degrees
below the ringplane.

The images in this view were acquired with the Cassini spacecraft
wide-angle camera on June 12, 2007, at a distance of approximately 523,000
kilometers (325,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 31 kilometers (19
miles) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European
Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages
the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The
Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and
assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space
Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.